Genocide, the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. The term, derived from the Greek genos (“race,” “tribe,” or “nation”) and the Latin cide (“killing”), was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born jurist who served as an adviser to the U.S. Department of War during World War II.

Poster of fugitives wanted for the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s.

U.S. Department of State

Although the term itself is of recent origin, genocide arguably has been practiced throughout history (though some observers have restricted its occurrence to a very few cases). According to Thucydides, for example, the people of Melos were slaughtered after refusing to surrender to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, in ancient times it was common for victors in war to massacre all the men of a conquered population. The massacre of Cathari during the Albigensian Crusade in the 13th century is sometimes cited as the first modern case of genocide, though medieval scholars generally have resisted this characterization. Twentieth-century events often cited as genocide include the 1915 Armenian massacre by the Turkish-led Ottoman Empire, the nearly complete extermination of European Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and other groups by NaziGermany during World War II, and the killing of Tutsi by Hutu in Rwanda in the 1990s.

Defining genocide: the Nürnberg Charter and the genocide convention

In his work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (1944), Lemkin noted that a key component of genocide was the

criminal intent to destroy or to cripple permanently a human group. The acts are directed against groups as such, and individuals are selected for destruction only because they belong to these groups.

In contemporary international law the crime of genocide is part of the broader category of “crimes against humanity,” which were defined by the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Nürnberg Charter). The charter granted the tribunal jurisdiction to indict and try the leaders of the Nazi regime for inhumane acts committed against civilians, as well as for acts of persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds; in so doing, it also contributed to the international criminalization of other forms of abusive conduct. The momentum created by the Nürnberg trials and the ensuing revelations of Nazi atrocities led to the passage by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly of Resolution 96-I (December 1946), which made the crime of genocide punishable under international law, and of Resolution 260-III (December 1948), which approved the text of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the first UN human rightstreaty. The convention, which entered into force in 1951, has been ratified by more than 130 countries. Although the United States played a major role in drafting the convention and was an original signatory, the U.S. Senate did not ratify it until 1988.

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In addition to the commission of genocide, the convention also made conspiracy, incitement, attempt, and complicity in genocide punishable under international law.

Criticisms of the genocide convention

Although the convention has enjoyed near unanimous international support and although the prohibition of genocide has become, according to the International Court of Justice, a peremptory norm (jus cogens [Latin: “compelling law”]) of international law, the convention has often been criticized for excluding political and social groups from the list of possible victims of genocide. The so-called “intentionality clause” of the convention’s definition of genocide—the part that mentions the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”—also is problematic. Two of the most common objections are that such intent can be difficult to establish and that the attempt to assign such intent to individuals makes little sense in modern societies, where violence can result as much from anonymous social and economic forces as from individual choices.

In support of the first objection, some scholars have noted that governments do not openly admit to committing genocidal acts—a fact that is borne out in history. The Iraqi regime of Ṣaddām Ḥussein, for example, portrayed its use of chemical warfare against the Kurds in the 1980s as an effort to reestablish law and order, and the Ottoman and successive Turkish governments asserted that the Armenians killed in the massacres were casualties of war. Even Germany’s Nazi regime did not publicize its extermination of Jews and other groups. In response, defenders of the intentionality clause have argued that “a pattern of purposeful action” leading to the destruction of a significant part of the targeted group is enough to establish genocidal intent, irrespective of the reasons the perpetrator regime offers for its actions.

Supporters of the second objection have argued that an approach that focuses solely on intent ignores the “structural violence” of social systems in which vast political and economic disparities can lead to the total marginalization and even extermination of particular groups. Defenders of the intentionality clause respond that it is necessary for differentiating genocide from other forms of mass killings and for devising effective strategies to prevent genocide.

The debates between supporters and opponents of the genocide convention have important policy implications, which can be seen in the discussion of the connection between war crimes and genocide. The two concepts differ principally in how the targeted group is defined and identified. Whereas the targeted group in the case of war crimes is identified by its status as an enemy, the targeted group in the case of genocide is identified by its racial, national, ethnic, or religious characteristics. The chief indication that the targeting is based on enemy status as opposed to racial, ethnic, or religious identity is primarily the behaviour of the group’s opponent once the conflict has ended. If the attacks against the targeted group cease, then the (probable) commission of war crimes is the issue at stake. If the attacks persist, however, the commission of genocide can legitimately be alleged. The importance attributed to post-conflict conduct reflects the realization that genocide can and does take place during wartime, usually under cover of war-related activities. The distinction between war crimes and genocide is of the utmost importance in any discussion of preventive action. In cases of war crimes, the termination of conflict would suffice, and no additional measures of protection would be necessary. In cases of genocide, the termination of conflict would necessitate the adoption of protective measures to ensure the group’s survival.

Although many of the criticisms of the genocide convention are well-founded, they should not obscure its strengths. The genocide convention was the first legal instrument to disentangle the most heinous of crimes against humanity from the “war-nexus” requirement, which had limited the jurisdiction of the Nürnberg tribunal to cases in which a crime against humanity was committed in conjunction with a crime against interstate peace. Instead, the convention declared that genocide is an international crime “whether committed in time of peace or in time of war.” Moreover, the convention was the first UN legal instrument to stipulate that individuals can incur international criminal responsibility whether or not they act on behalf of a state. The convention can also serve, in accordance with Article 8, as the legal basis of enforcement measures ordered by the Security Council (the only UN organ that can authorize the use of force).

Recent developments

During the first 50 years after its ratification, the genocide convention lacked effective enforcement mechanisms, despite the fact that it contained provisions to enable the UN to enforce it. Although the convention stipulated that persons charged with genocide should be tried before an international penal tribunal or a tribunal of the state in which the crime was committed, no permanent penal tribunal existed at the international level until the early 21st century, and prosecutions at the domestic level were unlikely except in the rare case where a genocidal regime was overthrown and its officials were prosecuted by a successor regime.

The genocide convention was first invoked before an international tribunal in 1993, when the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina argued before the International Court of Justice that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was in breach of its obligations under the convention. During the 1990s the international community became more vigorous in prosecuting alleged crimes of genocide. The UN Security Council established separate tribunals, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), both of which contributed to the clarification of the material elements of the offense of genocide as well as of the criteria establishing individual criminal responsibility for its commission. The Rwandan tribunal, for example, stated that genocide included “subjecting a group of people to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes and the reduction of essential medical services below minimum requirement.” It also ruled that “rape and sexual violence constitute genocide…as long as they were committed with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular group, targeted as such”—as was the case in the Rwandan conflict, where the government, dominated by the Hutu ethnic group, organized the mass rape of ethnic Tutsi women by HIV-infected men. On the critical issue of intent, the Yugoslav tribunal also ruled that genocidal intent can be manifest in the persecution of small groups of people as well as large ones. According to the tribunal, such intent

may consist of desiring the extermination of a very large number of the members of the group, in which case it would constitute an intention to destroy a group en masse. However, it may also consist of the desired destruction of a more limited number of persons selected for the impact that their disappearance would have upon the survival of the group as such. This would then constitute an intention to destroy the group “selectively.”

On July 1, 2002, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), adopted in 1998 in Rome by some 120 countries, entered into force. The ICC’s jurisdiction includes the crime of genocide, and the statute adopts the same definition of the offense as found in the genocide convention. The establishment of the ICC—though without the participation of the United States, China, and Russia—was another indication of a growing international consensus in favour of vigorous and concerted efforts to suppress and punish the crime of genocide.

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Genocide is the planned and organized killing of a group of people. Victims of genocide are killed because of their race, religion, ethnicity (culture), or nationality. Genocide is sometimes compared to ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing takes place when members of a particular group are forced to move from an area in order to make that area ethnically "pure."

Never in the history of the world have so many millions of people been deliberately exterminated as have been killed since 1900. These millions were not, for the most part, casualties of war. They were the victims of genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of racial, religious, ethnic, or political groups. A less violent form of genocide is the systematic destruction of a people’s culture.